HOW MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE WILL BE MURDERED BY BLACKS TODAY?..........THE LOOTING ACROSS AMERICA is as black as the staggering murder and crime rates of BLACKS ACROSS AMERICA. Black Lives Matter? NO LIFE MATTERS TO BLACKS!

Monday, August 28, 2017

AMERICAN TRAGEDY: THE HOUSTON FLOOD CATASTROPHE AND THE DECAY OF AMERICA

"Once again, a major storm has stripped away the pretense and revealed the brutal reality of American society, exposing pervasive poverty, staggering levels of inequality, and rampant official neglect and corruption."

"Like Katrina, Hurricane Harvey has lifted the lid on the ugly reality of American society, exposing colossal levels of social inequality, pervasive poverty and ruling class criminality."

Capitalism and the
Houston flood catastrophe

28 August 2017

Nearly twelve years
to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans,
Hurricane Harvey is wreaking havoc along the Texas Gulf Coast. Harvey has
caused widespread flooding in Houston, the fourth largest city in the country,
with 2.3 million people and a metropolitan area population of nearly 6.5
million.

Once again, a major
storm has stripped away the pretense and revealed the brutal reality of
American society, exposing pervasive poverty, staggering levelsof inequality,
and rampant official neglect and corruption. Scenes are unfolding of entire
families trudging through waist-high water befouled with oil, sewage and
chemicals; people young and old scrambling onto roofs in the desperate hope of
being rescued from rapidly rising water; entire sections of the city cut off
from shelter, food and clean water. The situation will only grow worse as the
storm continues to drop record volumes of rain on the city and its environs.

In the richest
country in the world, where

trillions of dollars were made available to the

banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial

crash, widespread destruction and
loss of life

have become a common feature of the

tornadoes, floods, hurricanes
and other

severe weather events that occur with

increasing frequency. This is
above all due to the decay of infrastructure and an acute social crisis that
has left millions without the means to prepare for a natural disaster.

The victims, as
always, are overwhelmingly working-class. Once again, scenes of human suffering
amid official dysfunction are shattering the claims of the United States to be
a land of prosperity and progress.

As in every such
crisis, the spontaneous response of ordinary people is one of social
solidarity. Victims of the storm are rushing to help their neighbors and
thousands of people are pouring into the impacted area to assist in saving
lives and providing food, shelter and medical care. This stands in the starkest
contrast to the authorities, who did nothing to ward off the impact of a major
flood or prepare to deal with its consequences.

This is despite the
fact that Houston and southeast Texas have seen one flood disaster after
another. The very existence of Houston as a major port city is due to the
hurricane in 1900 that destroyed the nearby city of Galveston. Since the turn
of the new century, Houston has been hit by tropical storm Allison in 2001,
Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Hurricane Ike in 2008. Harvey is the third major
flooding event in Houston in the past three years. Over the past forty years, Houston
has had more floods than any other major city in the United States. Floods are
the number one cause of deaths from natural events in Houston, known as the
“bayou city.”

A center of the oil
industry and home to the Bush family, Houston and the state of Texas are held
up as models of unrestrained free market capitalism. Houston and other major
Texas cities have seen substantial growth as major corporations relocated to
take advantage of the state’s low corporate tax rates, minimal regulations and
low-wage workforce, which includes millions of undocumented immigrants.

For decades, the city
has allowed developers and real estate speculators to carry out uncontrolled
expansion, replacing wetlands and prairie lands, which absorb water, with paved
surfaces, increasing the flood risk to the city. National, state and local
politicians have ignored the repeated warnings of scientists and experts that
they were courting disaster.

Hurricane protection
infrastructure has been neglected. After Hurricane Ike, experts proposed the
construction of seawalls along the coast and the erection of a floodgate around
the Houston Ship Channel. This project has yet to materialize. Its cost is
estimated at $6 billion to $8 billion, a small fraction of the revenue of the
US oil industry in a single year.

While the hurricane
and flood may be acts of nature, the scale of their impact has been magnified
by man-made factors. Indeed, even the weather events are profoundly affected by
economic and social conditions. There is no question that global warming, the
result of the anarchic, irrational and profit-driven nature of capitalism, is
responsible for the increasing frequency and severity of storms and floods in
the US and around the world.

As far as the
American ruling class is concerned, the main assets to be protected are the oil
refineries in the Houston area, not the city’s working-class residents.
Appearing on the “Fox News Sunday” program, Secretary of State and
multimillionaire former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson offered reassurances to
the financial elite that its investments were safe, declaring that the oil and
gas industry was “probably among the most prepared for these types of events.”

The Wall Street Journal published an article on
Sunday, as the floodwaters were rising in Houston, bearing the headline
“Hurricane Harvey Unlikely to Damage Insurers’ Balance Sheets.”

Houston exemplifies
the colossal levels of social inequality in America. Thirteen of the world’s
roughly 1,600 billionaires live in the city, which has an official poverty rate
of 25 percent and a child poverty rate of 38 percent. A recent study by the Pew
Research Center found that Houston is the most economically segregated city in
the United States, with the rich geographically isolated from the poor.

Many who were
stranded by Harvey’s

floodwaters have told reporters that

they simply lacked
the money to

evacuate.

As after Hurricane
Katrina, the BP oil spill of 2010 and dozens of floods in Houston and across
the country, nothing will be done to make the victims of the disaster whole.
More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of former
residents have still not been able to return home, and whole neighborhoods in
New Orleans remain depopulated wastelands. Moreover, the events in Houston come
as the Trump administration proposes to carry out hundreds of millions of
dollars in cuts to FEMA in the fiscal year 2018 budget, including sharp
reductions to projects associated with the Federal Flood Insurance Program.

The spontaneous
demonstration of solidarity, compassion and energy on the part of working
people in response to the Houston flood disaster shows in embryo the immense
potential for the development of a truly humane and rational society that
serves the needs of the people. What stands in the way are the outmoded social
relations of capitalism, which enable a tiny elite to monopolize wealth and
resources and plunder society to amass ever greater personal fortunes.

What is required is
the mobilization of the working class to put an end to the capitalist system
and to establish socialism, based on common ownership and control of the
productive forces and the principle of social equality.

Tom Hall

The Houston flood
disaster: A social crime of the American oligarchy

29 August 2017

The world is looking
on in shock as Houston, Texas, the fourth-largest city in the United States, is
engulfed by flood waters. At least nine people are dead, a figure that will no
doubt rise in the coming days. Thousands remain stranded, awaiting rescue. Tens
of thousands have been forced to take shelter in emergency accommodations. Some
of the worst rain is yet to come.

The catastrophic
flooding engulfing Houston and southeast Texas is spreading to cities as far
away as Dallas and Austin and threatening to once again overwhelm New Orleans,
Louisiana. Hurried evacuations are being organized in cities throughout the
region, as well as previously unaffected neighborhoods in Houston, where
residents are being forced to abandon their homes as officials release water
from overwhelmed and endangered reservoirs.

Twelve years after
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, an even larger and more populous
metropolitan area is being turned into a scene of indescribable suffering. The
countless examples of human solidarity among the victims, overwhelmingly
working class and of all races, contrasts starkly with the indifference and
incompetence of the government and political establishment.

Like Katrina,
Hurricane Harvey has lifted the

lid on the ugly reality of American society,

exposing colossal levels of social inequality,

pervasive poverty and ruling
class criminality.

Behind the mindless media commentary, generally favorable to
the White House and the right-wing Republican governor of Texas, and the
pro-forma statements of politicians, one senses nervousness and fear that this
latest demonstration of the failure of American capitalism will trigger an
eruption of social indignation.

But the authorities
cannot conceal their complacency and indifference. In a disgusting performance,
President Donald Trump gave a press conference Monday in which he combined
lavish praise for the official response to the flood disaster, calling it
“incredible to watch” and a display of “cooperation and love,” with bathos
about “one American family” that “hurts together and endures together.”

Reciting his scripted
remarks as though he were reading the phonebook, Trump offered no proposals to
relieve the suffering of the victims or provide them with money to rebuild
their lives. He evaded a question about his proposal to slash hundreds of
millions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),
including steep cuts to the Federal Flood Insurance Program.

FEMA administrator
William “Brock” Long on Monday gave himself and the government a blanket
amnesty for their dereliction, declaring, “You could not forecast this up. You
could not dream this forecast up.”

The Wall Street Journal sounded the same theme in
an editorial posted Monday. “Immunity from nature’s fury,” the newspaper wrote,
“is an illusion that humans cultivate until we are forced to confront that fury
again. We forget the damage that storms and earthquakes can do.”

This renunciation of
any responsibility for the

unfolding disaster in Houston was combined

with
praise for the massive accumulation of

wealth among the uppermost layers of

society, declaring that “Complex societies can

better cope with the damage if
they have a

reservoir of accumulated wealth” among

“private sources.”

Thus,
according to the leading mouthpiece of Wall Street, the answer to the unfolding
tragedy in Texas is the further enrichment of the financial oligarchy!

Such claims that
catastrophic events like the Texas flood are inevitable “natural disasters,”
and nothing can be done either to forestall, contain or manage them, are
self-serving lies.

Houston is the most
frequently flooded urban area in the country. Officials at the federal, state
and local level were repeatedly warned by scientists and weather experts that
the license given to real estate developers and speculators to pave over
wetlands, as well as the government’s refusal to build proper flood defenses,
was setting the city up for an unprecedented flood disaster. These warnings
were ignored.

This is the 21st
century, not the Dark Ages, and the United States is the richest country in the
world. Four hundred years ago, the Dutch figured out how to build cities
situated below sea level. The US is, moreover, home to some of the most
advanced research and engineering institutes in the world. Yet supposedly no
one could have anticipated or planned for the flooding of a major city on the
Gulf of Mexico?

What has been done in
the 12 years since Katrina to prevent more hurricane disasters? Nothing! Or,
more accurately, less than nothing, because Katrina was seized on as an
opportunity to treat New Orleans as virgin territory for the privatization of
public assets and establishment of a free market paradise for big business, to
be replicated across the country. The most overt example of this plundering operation
was the dismantling of the public school system in favor of private, for-profit
charter schools.

Catastrophes such as
the Texas flood are social crimes, committed by a financial aristocracy that
has spent the past half-century plundering the country and neglecting its
social infrastructure, while accumulating unimaginable sums of personal wealth.
According to the corporate-controlled media and the entire political
establishment—Democrats no less than Republicans—there is no money to build up
flood defenses or rebuild crumbling bridges, roads and water systems, modernize
and expand public transport or provide decent schools and housing for the
population.

But there are
trillions of dollars

stashed away in the bank accounts and

stock portfolios of
the rich and the

super-rich. Hundreds of billions are

squandered every year on
the

instruments of war.

The country staggers
from one preventable disaster to another: Katrina in 2005, the BP oil spill in
2010, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and now Harvey. In between are countless
floods, tornadoes, fires and other events that wreak havoc on working class and
poor families, who are left to fend for themselves by a ruling elite drowning
in its own excess.

Just as in the feudal
era, when the development of society required the expropriation of the landed
aristocracy, so today society must seize control of its own resources from the
modern aristocracy of finance and corporate wealth. The barbarians of today,
who hoard society’s wealth and say nothing can be done to address poverty,
disease, war or repression, must go the way of all ruling classes that stand in
the way of social progress.

It is not that
society cannot afford the type of social investment needed to prevent or
minimize the impact of events such as Hurricane Harvey. What society cannot
afford is the rich.

It is to the working
class—united across all racial, national and ethnic lines, both in the US and
internationally—that the task falls of removing this monstrous obstacle to
progress from the historical scene. The capitalist parasites must be
expropriated, their wealth used to meet social needs, and their stranglehold
over the means of production shattered to allow the rational, planned and
humane development of economic and social life on the basis of socialist
ownership and democratic control of industry, finance and the planet’s natural
resources.

Barry Grey

THE BIG “DEAL MAKER”
TWITTER TRUMP WORKS OUT A NO WALL DEAL WITH NARCOMEX

….. LA RAZA WILL NOT BE
PAYING FOR THE ALL THAT MIGHT IMPEDED THEIR SUCKING OF $100 BILLION PER YEAR
OUT OF AMERICA’S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS!

"These
figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in
America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to
be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human
toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty

AMERICA UNRAVELS:

Millions of children go hungry as the super- rich gorge themselves
and ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE!

"The top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly
three-quarters of all household wealth."

"While
telling workers there is “not enough money” for wage increases, or to fund
social programs, both parties hailed the recent construction of the U.S.S.
Gerald Ford, a massive aircraft carrier that cost $13 billion to build,
stuffing the pockets of numerous contractors and war profiteers."

JAMES WALSH

THE OBAMA HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA

“The
watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama
administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices
Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington
Times

"These figures present a scathing
indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest
country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy.
They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and
all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty.

MEXICO: AMERICA’S DRUG DEALER!

The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality,
with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an
extent not seen since the 1920s.

“This study follows reports released over
the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due
to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall
leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy
of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”

THE LA
RAZA PLAN: California’s final surrender to fly the Mexican flag within 4 years.

"The
American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction
of Mexico without firing a single shot." -- - EXCELSIOR --- national
newspaper of Mexico

Is Medicaid fuelling the opioid crisis?

Without thinking much about it, someone who overdoses on prescription opioids of heroin can just keep going right back to Medicaid for more easy access to the drug that nearly killed them the first time. The state just keeps paying for it.

Which is why, according to a new study, Medicaid recipients are three times more likely to overdose on opioids than people on private insurance.

Sure, it's easy to dismiss the opioid crisis as a phenomenon peculiar to people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. But obviously, there are causes and mechanisms here, which is why the numbers are coming in as they are. It's not just the supposed character flaws of those taking these opioids that is at work, it's the drug dealer that accommodates them on the other side, which in this case, the state. Dependency on the state seems to be fuelling dependency on drugs as much as anything.

The study evaluated Medicaid claims in Pennsylvania from 2008 through 2013 for those individuals ages 12 to 64 who had experienced a prescription opioid or heroin overdose. There were 6,013 cases found—3,945 were individuals who overdosed on prescription opioids and 2,068 overdosed on heroin.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, individuals on Medicaid are three times more likely to have a risk of opioid overdose than those who are privately insured.

Fifty-nine percent of those who overdosed on opioids were given opioid prescriptions after they overdosed, and 39.7 percent of those who overdosed on heroin were given the same.

"Our findings signal a relatively weak health system response to a potentially life-threatening event," said Julie Donahue, Ph.D., who authored the study. "However, they also point to opportunities for interventions that could prevent future overdoses in a particularly vulnerable population."

Notice also that the states that have increased Medicaid expansion in the greatest amounts due to the Affordable Care Act are also the ones that are known to have the greatest problems with the opioid crisis, if one takes a look at this graph here:

This is not to say there aren't other causes for the opioid crisis as well. President Obama's open borders policy opened the floodgates for cartel imports of opiates for one. The pressures on the medical profession, in which doctors are pressed by addicts to prescribe opioids in unsafe amounts or else be hit with bad patient reviews is another. There also is the poverty and lack of opportunity that motivates many to want to take opioids. But there is little doubt the round-heeled way Medicaid prescribes in its runaway expense culture plays a role, too.

So much for the claim about the heartlessness of private insurance companies. At least its recipients are alive to tell about it. Things happen because there are incentives for them to happen. If a gift is freely given, you take it, as Milton Friedman once observed. And to paraphrase his student, Thomas Sowell, you can have all the opioid addiction you'd like to pay for.

MEXICO: AMERICA’S DRUG DEALER!

The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s.

“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”